


Happy

by saintsrow2



Series: Fucking it Up [2]
Category: Saints Row
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-08
Updated: 2016-08-08
Packaged: 2018-08-07 12:11:58
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 17,986
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7714456
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/saintsrow2/pseuds/saintsrow2
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“I’m seeing somebody.”<br/>Boss froze. He was trying to remain inconspicuous, but it was a testament to the obliviousness of the Saints that they didn’t notice the beer bottle threatening to shatter in his grip. Johnny drained the bottle he was holding and then got up, slapping the nearest Saint on the shoulder in a friendly farewell. “I’ll catch you guys later.”<br/>He left, giving Boss a quick wink that no one else caught, but made whatever it was that Boss called a heart flutter just a little. Boss took a long drink of beer, measuring out the time it would take for him to leave without it looking suspicious. Too soon and people might wonder where they were going together. It was better to leave no room for any questions at all.<br/>“I wonder what his girl’s like.”<br/>“Boss, Boss, you know her?”<br/>“Sure,” Boss said, a cold panic settling on his mind. Was he Johnny’s girl? He wasn’t anyone’s fucking girl. </p>
<p>Following on from <i>Fun</i>, Boss and Johnny are now... Dating? Not dating? They don't know, and if Johnny has his way, neither will anybody else. Things are going wrong in the gang and wrong in their relationship, and the real question is how long they can live in denial.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Happy

**Author's Note:**

> This fic was written for my friend [Tupu](http://vinkumakkara.tumblr.com) who is an amazing artist whose work you should absolutely check out if you wanna see some great Saints Row fanart and the particular Boss who stars in this fic. 
> 
> Also a very important note; _Happy_ takes place between 2 and between [Saints Row: Undercover](http://saintsrowundercover.tumblr.com/). "What's Saints Row: Undercover?" I hear you say through the internet, because I have magic fucking hearing powers now. [Saints Row: Undercover](http://saintsrowundercover.tumblr.com/) is a webcomic being written by me and drawn by the aforementioned Tupu. It's an alternate take on what could have happened after 2, based on the cancelled Saints Row PSP game of the same name. It is very, very worth checking out. And a lot of the events in _Happy_ foreshadow Saints Row: Undercover so if you find yourself wondering "Hey wait, what about X?" Well, Tupu wanted this fic to be a prequel to that, so a prequel to that it is. It's a fanfic for a fanfic, if you can believe that wild nonsense.
> 
> Anyway. Here's 18,000 words of relationship drama and internalised homophobia.

Johnny kissed the Boss long and hard, enough for the Boss to go a little weak at the knees, bowing under Johnny as they kissed with a kind of desperate hunger. They had always fucked a lot like they fought; both out of the love of it, and in a constant bid to out-do one another. Johnny pushed Boss away, rough enough to make it fun, and flung him down onto the bed. Boss hardly had time to catch his breath before the Johnny already on the bed was all over him, mouth at his throat both sweet kisses and the bite of teeth, hand sliding up the inside of Boss’ leg. Not one to be outshone, the first Johnny joined them on the bed, dragging his mouth over the Boss’ taut stomach towards where his erection was already straining at his pants. Second Johnny kissed Boss full on the lips, pulling back just when the first Johnny ran his tongue over the Boss’ cock, listening to the Boss moan helplessly.

Second Johnny brushed a thumb over Boss’ lips, smiling down at him with a kind of unsuited benevolence. Second Johnny leaned in close, lips to the Boss’ ear as the Boss trembled from anticipation, and said;

“I don’t love you.”

“What?” The Boss said, snapping out of the moment faster than if everyone involved had just gotten up and left the room. He was dazed, too vulnerable a position to really hide the hurt on his face, still looking like he wanted this to be some kind of sick joke.

“Yeah, I don’t love you,” the first Johnny said, sitting upright and looming over the Boss alongside the second Johnny in a way that stopped being a turn-on, and started feeling a lot more like Boss was on the operating table and surrounded by the world’s most sadistic doctors. “I’ll fuck you, but that’s it.”

“I can’t ever love you,” second Johnny agreed. “First of all, that would be gay.”

“And I’m not gay,” said a third Johnny by the door that the Boss hadn’t even _noticed_ before, standing with his arms crossed and a face painted with vivid disgust. “You’re just another bitch to me.”

“But I love you,” Boss said, helplessly. He was cold all over, clammy feeling, with hot spikes of pain jolting all over his body every time his rapidly pounding heartbeat.

The growing crowd of identical faces hovering over his bed laughed humourlessly. Surrounded on all sides, a dozen people stood, eyes hidden beneath dark, shiny glass and faces twisted with scorn. Boss couldn’t move, pinned underneath their stares alone, as weak to Johnny’s will here as he ever was.

“You should have known better,” a Johnny said. “I’m ashamed of this. It’s disgusting. I’m _degrading_ myself having anything to do with a faggot like you.”

Boss tried to twist his head to look around, and saw, somehow for the first time, the cavern that split his chest in two, pale skin torn open like someone had ripped a hole right through him. In the centre of his yawning, open ribcage, sat an engorged purple heart, beating lurid violet blood out across the Boss’ chest in hot rivulets. He could do nothing but stare at it in disembodied horror, blue eyes wide and startled, the toxic heart shaking under the strain of keeping him breathing.

“I’m a real man,” another Johnny added, unconcerned about how grotesquely overexposed the Boss was. “A real gangster. I don’t give a shit about what you feel.”

“It’s so easy to not feel anything,” a Johnny said, leaning right over the Boss, his eyeless face smooth and expressionless in a way that was still completely devastating, the detached callousness of it all somehow more horrifying than impassioned hatred. This was not personal; the Boss had never been anything to him at all. “You’d understand if you weren’t such a fucking pussy.”

“But I love you,” Boss said again, the words still so frighteningly easy to say and believe.

“Do you mind if I take this?” The calm Johnny said, plunging his hand inside the Boss’ chest, and taking hold of the failing heart, tearing it free of the constraints of arteries and veins and Boss’ life. “I lost mine years ago.”

 

He woke up with a jolt, body gripped with panic so intense he could scarcely move his chest to breathe. He was sweating like a pig, heart thundering almost painfully from fear, but it was a welcome reminder he was alive. It was so dark in the room that he couldn’t see, and filled up with nothing but vague shadowy shapes even the familiar space felt threatening. Lying on his back and staring up at the black void of the ceiling, he felt angry at himself for getting so absurdly upset over a _dream_ , over a bunch of totally meaningless garbled nonsense that his brain had spewed up.

His arm was getting numb, trapped under the weight of the other person sleeping beside him, so he tried to retract it as carefully as he could without causing a disturbance. But, subtlety had never been his strength.

“¿Qué está pasando?” Boss mumbled, barely awake and a little sleepily annoyed about losing his pillow.

Johnny hesitated for a second, not certain if he should fess up to being reduced to a blubbering baby over a nightmare, or just try to brush the whole thing off.

“Wanted my arm back,” Johnny said, providing no other explanation. It was mostly true. “Go back to sleep.”

Boss murmured incoherently, and Johnny could hear him shifting around on the bed before he eventually rolled over, laying his head on Johnny’s chest and flinging an arm around him. His head sat right over Johnny’s heart now, the weight of it immediately calming.

“You know I never sleep anyway,” Boss said. “Ruining my night.”

“Yo, don’t _guilt_ me about having nightmares,” Johnny said.

“You had a nightmare?”

This was bordering on uncomfortable now, Johnny gritting his teeth as he desperately tried to react to this with the _least_ reactions possible.

“Yeah,” he said, “my chest was cut open, and my guts were like, hanging out.”

“Ugh,” Boss grunted. His hand brushed over Johnny’s bare chest, feeling the contours of his pecs and stomach, the hard muscle and patches of rougher skin where the scar tissue lay. It was not, however, split open. It never had been.

“My blood was purple,” Johnny added thoughtfully.

“Damn right,” Boss said.

Johnny didn’t know why it was so much easier for him to say he had been Boss in the dream. It was just less difficult, to say he had been the victim. His left hand grasped at empty air now, but he could still feel what it had been like to hold the Boss’ scorching hot heart in his hand, as if it had burnt an imprint into his skin.

 

That summer had been the hottest in history, the kind of heat where your clothes stuck to your skin and metal was hot enough to roast you. It had been sticky, sickening heat, where you couldn’t sleep at night and the sheets felt like sandpaper. Summer, drenched in sweat and blood in equal measures, broke through to autumn with a clap of thunder, and it kept storming for the whole of the fall. Torrential rain, some of the worst in Stilwater’s history, washed the blood from the streets and took some of the polish off Ultor’s renovations with it. Like the heat had been fuelling the madness of the summer, things felt calmer in the fall. Natural order had been restored.

The Boss’ cell phone was ringing at a pitch designed to cause distress to people too comfortable in their beds. Boss came to, bleary-eyed and drowsy, and found that he couldn’t reach it _and_ stay stuck limpet-like to Johnny’s side, try as he might. He pushed himself off Johnny’s torso – waking Johnny up with an unflattering snort –– and crawled across the blankets to where his jeans sat in a crumpled pile at the bottom of the bed. He freed the phone from a pocket, and reluctantly answered it.

Johnny grumbled to himself, rubbing his eyes and finally managing to bring himself to stay awake. He scooped his watch off the floor, saw that it was gone nine o’clock in the morning, and felt vaguely impressed they’d managed to sleep for even that long. It definitely wasn’t the non-stop frenzy of the summer anymore, but taking a break was a vital skill the Boss took to about as well as a duck to mechanical engineering. Johnny levered himself upright, propping himself up on his elbows to watch Boss as he lay on his stomach and barked orders over the phone.

“What is it?” Had been the opening line, Boss already gearing up to be in a bad mood.

“We need you down at Purgatory, Boss,” said the Saint on the other end of the line. Boss did not immediately recognise who it was. There were too many Saints to keep track of them all, and the gang had only inflated since the victory over Ultor.

“What’s going on?” Boss said.

“Shit’s going crazy here, bunch of guys just lost it and started whaling on each other. They won’t fucking stop, so I figured maybe you’d be able to get them back in line.”

“What? Why the fuck are they fighting?”

“I don’t know, Boss. Some dumb shit about being real gangsters. They’re out in the parking lot and I think the cops are starting to notice. They’re all gonna get arrested real soon.”

“I’m coming down there,” Boss said. At that exact moment, Johnny clapped a hand done on Boss’ ass hard enough to make him yelp with surprise. He twisted around to give Johnny a death glare, trying to finish his conversation.

“Are you alright?” The Saint said.

“I’m fine,” the Boss said, Johnny barely concealing the smirk on his face. He had not removed his hand. “I’ll be there in five.”

He hung up, slapping Johnny’s hand away before he clambered out of bed. Johnny feigned mock disappointment as Boss pulled on the jeans and vest from yesterday.

“What’s goin’ on?” Johnny said.

“Everyone’s going fucking nuts back home,” Boss said. “Some fight broke out, I gotta get down there and stop it. You wait like ten minutes and then meet me there.”

“I can just come with you,” Johnny said. “They’ll think you just called me.”

“Yeah, maybe,” Boss said.

Johnny swung his legs out of bed, started grabbing his dirty clothes off the floor, but then stopped short as Boss was pulling on his own boots.

“Will they notice we’re both wearing the same clothes as yesterday?” Johnny said.

“Fuck, maybe,” Boss said, but ended up just shrugging it off. “I always wear the same thing anyway.”

“You got a huge bite mark like right here,” Johnny said, gesturing at the Boss’ neck.

“Fuck! I told you to be careful.”

“No offence Boss, but that ain’t what you were telling me last night.” Johnny grabbed a different button-up from the closet, hoping it would be enough of a change to avoid anyone noticing. He threw Boss a jacket to try to cover up the obvious bruise. “It was more like _Oh Johnny, harder, fuck me Johnny_.”

“I do _not_ sound like that.”

“You sound _exactly_ like that.”

Boss made a jerk-off motion that just made Johnny laugh, but he still waited for Johnny to get his shoes on before bolting for the door. Purgatory was close enough that they could have spit on it from the front step of the loft, the two of them choosing not to drive in favour of trying to run to the club in a way that didn’t make them look overly desperate. It wouldn’t do to not look cool when they were coming to kick some ass. What the fuck was going on down there was beyond Boss, but it wouldn’t be the first time for Saints to clash. You couldn’t have a gang of this size and not have people who didn’t like each other, the size the general nature of people who joined hyper-violent street gangs inviting constant conflict.

They turned the corner into the huge parking lot in front of Purgatory, finding a group of maybe six or seven Saints brawling on the tarmac. A crowd of onlookers, easily over a dozen or more, surrounded them, alternatively cheering and jeering, treating the fight like a live show. Johnny couldn’t stop himself from laughing, but the Boss stared on in angered confusion. He didn’t understand why this was happening, and the fact it _was_ happening felt like a slap in the face.

It took a second before he was noticed, the onlookers’ cheering dying down into uncomfortable silence. A couple of the fighters came to inelegant stops, stumbling and tripping over themselves when the momentum was interrupted. Others didn’t notice, carrying on with the assault, only concern taking the other guys down as fast as possible, anything outside of that be damned.

“Maybe we should join in,” Johnny said, “show ‘em a real fight.”

But Boss didn’t want to tear into his own soldiers, instead choosing to head into the brawl and pull the last few scrapping Saints apart. People parted way for him as he came forward, scrambling out of his path so as to try and avoid getting caught up in his wrath. He grabbed two of the people in the centre of the fight by the back of their shirts, physically pulling them away from each other, both of them going limp in his hands like wet kittens, staring up at Boss with surprised and slightly frightened expressions.

“What the fuck is going on?” Boss demanded.

His mistake had been in not singling out one person for an answer. The group, both people he was holding, and most of the onlookers, burst into a clamour of voices, everyone desperate to have their say before someone else had the chance to condemn them.

“Think they’re better than everyone-”

“I’m new but I’m a _real_ gangster-”

“This never woulda happened if this gang weren’t full of dumbass babies-”

“Bitches need to get _told!_ ”

“He fucking started it, man! Fucking pendejo talking shit about the new Saints. We got canonised like everybody else!”

“Gang is full of groupies! Don’t know a fuckin’ thing about being gangster, just want _attention._ ”

“Never would have happened when Julius was in charge.”

On that last one, the Boss dropped the Saints he was holding as if he’d been electrocuted. He pivoted on his heel, swinging around to face the person who had dared speak out in favour of Julius Little. The disgust rippled through the crowd, everyone eager to out the Judas amongst them, mere mention of the last leader of the Saints enough to send the group into chaos. Boss couldn’t make sense of the jumble of raised voice around him, too many people shouting over each other to ferret out any understanding other than just _anger._ Angry that Julius had been spoken of, angry that the Boss was being questioned, angry that the Saints had fallen into this kind of disarray; there were an infinite number of reasons why. But Boss wasn’t focused on those, instead was barrelling towards the traitor with terrifying purpose.

If the Saint who had spoken out regretted what he’d done, he at least wasn’t so much of a coward that he immediately backed down as soon as the Boss turned on him. Stupid, maybe, but not a coward. Standing face to face with the Boss, he lowered his head, but didn’t look away. He was smaller the Boss, at least fifteen years older, a man in his forties who had decades more of gang experience. Maybe one of the ex-Vice Kings who had left when Julius had bailed out on _that_ gang. Boss didn’t know. All he knew was that this man had spoken against him, in favour of _Little_ , and Boss had no tolerance for that.

“You got something to say?” Boss said, more of a threat than an invitation.

“All I’m sayin’ is,” the man said, “no one acted like this when Julius was in charge.”

“When Julius was in charge, we quit as soon as the cops told us to,” Boss said. “Julius died one of Ultor’s bitches. He rolled right over and let Ultor snatch the Row right from under him. That really what you want?”

There was some cheering, but Boss didn’t really get any gratitude from it. He didn’t like talking about this, even thinking about it, even if he _was_ right. The Saints stared back at him, face cold but not openly hostile, just a blank canvas.

“Guess you’re right, Boss,” he said eventually. “I don’t want that.”

He made no clarification on what he did want, just slipped away from the centre of the crowd, away from the angry catcalling of the Boss’ supporters. The mob outside of Purgatory had not shown any signs of disbanding, this still looking like the hot new gossip of the week. Boss looked up at Johnny, who seemed to take the hint and started trying to disperse the group a little, clapping his hands to gather attention.

“Show’s fuckin’ over,” he yelled out to the crowd. “Get the hell outta here before I start canonising all of you.”

Didn’t need any more encouragement, the group began to immediately fracture and drift apart, returning to Purgatory or abandoning the club entirely in favour of spending their mornings somewhere else. Boss was a little impressed by how swiftly Johnny took control of the group, but he felt a twinge of jealousy at the same time. There was an effortlessness to Johnny’s interactions with the group that the Boss couldn’t help but envy.

Johnny shrugged at him, not knowing the internal struggle Boss was going through. He waved a thumb at Purgatory.

“Let’s go inside, yeah?” He said, just wanting to leave the scene of the crime behind.

 

Something about Purgatory comforted the Boss. Looking out of the glass walls of his office and seeing the dozens of Saints — far more than had been outside, even this early in the day — and Saints fans and followers crowding the floor and rooms that sprawled off the club, it gave him a buzz of confidence. This was what he and Johnny had created. It had been their dream, their idea, that _they_ had worked together to build out of nothing but their own desire to make the Saints great. Pierce, Shaundi, Carlos had helped, but this had been his and Johnny’s at the start, the last Saints who weren’t willing to let go. He’d pulled himself up from nothing, twice over, and he would not let what he had built crumble under him.

He could handle there being some discord in the gang. They were not used to the peace times yet, and with too many members meant some people were inevitably going to grow bored from disuse. There would always be friction, there would always be loudmouth ingrates who didn’t have any respect. Boss was not going to grow fearful of his own gang. He wasn’t Frankenstein, wringing his hands and weeping with despair at the sight of his own creation. He had long ago come to the understanding that he was the monster that Frankenstein had built, and he was not afraid.

Pierce and Shaundi had arrived a while after the Boss and Johnny, clueless as to the fighting that had been going on earlier. They had been embarrassed after they were filled in, angry for not knowing and for the behaviour of the gang. They had lapsed into immediate bickering over what the issue was, and what was the best way to handle it. Despite the time they had spent with each other, Pierce and Shaundi’s relationship remained stubbornly in the area of ‘quarrelsome siblings’, picking on and undermining each other like children. They could work together when it suited them, but their friendship manifested as apparent hatred.

“It’s got nothing to do with Julius,” Shaundi said. “They’re just unhappy, and it’s a good way to get under the Boss’ skin.”

“It’s got _everything_ to do with Julius,” Pierce said. “That guy was charismatic. People still like him.”

“Guy was a fucking traitor,” Johnny said, taking umbrage at the praise of a man he’d once respected above all else. Pierce held up a hand, like trying to calm a bull.

“I’m not saying he wasn’t,” he said. “But he could still have a hold over people.”

“Grass is always greener on the other side,” Shaundi said. “They just want to complain. You’re over-thinking this.”

“You’re _under-_ thinking this.”

“Little wasn’t a demon; he hasn’t hypnotised everyone into following his orders from beyond the grave.”

“Stick to one supernatural metaphor.”

“Get serious.”

“ _You_ get serious!”

Boss finally turned away from staring out of the window of the office and got himself involved in the fight unfolding in front of him.

“Look,” Boss said, cutting through the argument and killing it with a single word. People still listened sometimes, when he wanted them to, and that still felt good. “I don’t give a shit if they still worship Julius day and night. I just don’t want to worry about my gang not stabbing me in the back.”

“That’s not gonna happen,” Johnny said.

“I know it won’t,” Boss said. “I’m just asking if everyone agrees with me.”

“I don’t think it’s that serious,” Shaundi said. “People are always going to complain about shit. You just don’t see it.”

“Fuck you mean _I just don_ _’t see it?_ ”

“You’re not in touch with people, Boss,” Pierce said. “You just kinda do your own thing.”

Boss frowned. He had been pulling a kind of lone wolf act since he’d first joined the Saints, and aside from occasionally dragging his friends or random Saints he ran into at appropriate times along with him, he’d never felt the need to involve people in his duties. He got things done by himself.

“Older Saints want more respect. Authority over kids,” Shaundi said.

“I’m not making everyone who’s been here more than a year a lieutenant.”

“Make up a new rank,” Johnny said. “Sergeants.”

“Why don’t we just become the Armed Forces of the Saints’ Republic of Stilwater?” Boss said, with enough sarcasm to kill a horse.

“Don’t sound bad to me,” Johnny said. “Get a tank.”

“Tempting,” Boss said. “Where would we keep it?”

“Wherever the fuck we wanted to. Who’s gonna say no? We have a _tank_.”

Pierce looked unimpressed, despite the fact he definitely should have been used to the kind of genius ideas Boss and Johnny came up with when left to their own devices. In all honesty, maybe Boss wasn’t ready to take this seriously just yet. He couldn’t bring himself to fully buy into the Saints being a threat against him. What were the Saints without him? Historically, a failure. The Saints had a tank. It was him, and he was going to do whatever the fuck he wanted to.

“Yeah, maybe I’ll hang around the gang more,” Boss said. “But I’m not babysitting them. They’ll get used to this gang being run the way I want it to be. We’re not a democracy.”

King Boss. Him and Johnny were wearing matching smirks then, cockiness returning in a familiar wave. They would, as always, be fine.

 

Tee’N’Ay is and always had been an absolute dive, but the Boss liked it. He liked it for the same reasons he liked his entire crappy, ugly, run-down city. It was what he was used to, people gave him respect there, and if anyone tried to change anything, he could shoot them in the head. The bar was perpetually too hot and humid in a way the inside of buildings never should be, especially not when winter was encroaching like an oncoming army, and the air stunk of things it didn’t do to talk about in polite company. Boss was sat with Johnny and a couple of other Saints at the bar, drinking and talking shit, all while Boss tried to pretend he wasn’t thinking about how soon he’d be able to leave with Johnny. Listening to the conversation of the others was not much distraction from the slight pressure of Johnny’s shoulder against his, whole mind, whole life, revolving around his… Johnny. He took a long drink of beer.

“Man, what you gotta have to go home with a girl like that? Money? Big dick? Nice car?”

“You ain’t got none of those. Guess you aren’t goin’ home with a girl like that.”

“Neither do you, asshole! And she ain’t all over you, neither.”

“Shouldn’t have come out with the Boss and Gat.” The Saint winked at the Boss in a way that was a little too friendly. Boss let it slide. “Bitches aren’t gonna be looking us with them two around.”

All three of the Saints, and Johnny, laughed and clinked bottles together, proud of the grand achievement. Boss just smiled, too cool to laugh. He didn’t really think it was all that impressive. He was conscious of not particularly caring if other people were attracted to him; it wasn’t something he had lost nights over before, and now he had Johnny in his bed almost every night, it mattered even less. Fifty miscellaneous strangers did not add up to Johnny Gat.

A bored looking woman on the other end of the bar winked in their direction, blatantly looking right at Johnny. Johnny did not react in any discernible way, knocking back the beer he was holding and acting as though he hadn’t noticed. It was hard to guess exactly where he was looking, shades obscuring his eyes, but Boss felt sure Johnny was _ignoring_ the girl, deliberately.

“Yo, she definitely wants you Johnny,” one of the Saints said, indicating the girl with all the subtlety of a semi-truck. The girl in question flicked her hair and tried to look nonchalant.

“Whatever,” Johnny said, voice neutral.

“You aren’t interested? I’d be all over her.”

“Have her,” Johnny shrugged. “I’m seeing somebody.”

Boss froze. He was trying to remain inconspicuous, but it was a testament to the obliviousness of the Saints that they didn’t notice the beer bottle threatening to shatter in Boss’ grip. He took a long drink, throat inexplicably dry.

“Jesus,” a Saint said. “Hell of a woman to keep Johnny Gat locked up.”

“I’m never getting myself tied down like that. No way.”

“No one _wants_ to tie you down, Paulie.”

“That’s all bitches want! Watch out she don’t try and turn you straight, too. Going to the store and cleanin’ up and shit.”

“I doubt it,” Johnny said, in a tone that bordered on being icy, but was calm enough not to make anyone _too_ nervous. He drained the bottle he was holding and then got up, slapping the nearest Saint on the shoulder in a friendly farewell. “I’ll catch you guys later.”

He left, giving Boss a quick wink that no one else caught, but made whatever it was that Boss called a heart flutter just a little. Boss took a long drink of beer, measuring out the time it would take for him to leave without it looking suspicious. Too soon and people might wonder where they were going together. It was better to leave no room for any questions at all.

“Johnny’s so fucking cool.”

“Dude is scary as hell but he is _so cool_.”

“Did you see the other day when he tagged that cop from like a block away? He can aim like a fucking sniper.”

It was always nice, to have people acknowledge how great Johnny was. He’d always known it, the most obvious and indisputable fact in the world. But it had taken a while for other people to notice it. He wondered what they said about him behind his back. People had always been willing to talk shit to his face, but there was still always that lingering question of what they said when he wasn’t listening. He did not say anything, just nodded at the Saints’ conversation as though he was absorbed in any way.

“I wonder what his girl’s like.”

“Gotta be smoking.”

“Probably why he keeps her locked up away from everyone else. Probably one of those guys who’ll kill you for even looking.”

“Boss, Boss, you know her?”

“Sure,” Boss said, a cold panic settling on his mind. Was he Johnny’s _girl_? He wasn’t anyone’s fucking _girl_.

“You know he used to date Aisha?”

“Bullshit.”

“He did! Before she died.”

“Man, I bet he’s dating another pop star or something. She’s keeping it quiet because of the paps.”

“The _what?_ ”

“Paparazzi.”

“Oh shit dude, I thought you meant like, pap smear.”

“What the fuck, Paulie?”

Boss finished the beer, made his way out of the bar, the group all attempting to seem laid back and chilled out when they said they’d catch him later. He knew they’d be talking about hanging out with the Boss and Johnny for a while after, like the five of them had become the best of friends in the brief few hours they’d spent hanging around Tee’N’Ay. He didn’t care. It was kind of flattering.

He drove back to Purgatory, listening to a commercial for Impressions and thinking about the past in an absent way. Nothing concrete, just wisps of scenes and moments, things playing on his mind in a way too abstract for him to understand why it came back to him at all. Watching Johnny drive Stefan out of Impressions with a baseball bat, King in the backseat shaking his head at the audacity of it. Driving a bulldozer through a statue of Hughes while Johnny laughed until he was breathless. Kissing Johnny for the first time in a parking lot and knowing, consciously knowing and choosing to ignore, that it was almost definitely a mistake.

It was raining when he climbed out of his Baron in the Purgatory parking lot, the potholes in the concrete filling up with dirty rainwater. He sprinted from the car to the elevator, waiting for the lift to come up while he hid in the doorway and watched the rain make everything shiny slick and freezing. He stepped inside the elevator, brushing drops of water off his sleeves, not caught in the rain long enough to get soaked, but definitely a little damp around the edges.

Johnny was sitting on the bed when the Boss arrived, watching some mindless garbage on television and smiling to himself as if he was the most contented man in the world. Boss sat down on the bed next to him, kicking off his boots and jacket.

“So who’s this woman you’re seeing?” Boss said. “I know her?”

“I think so,” Johnny said. “About six-three, skinny as hell, wears a beanie all the time?”

“I don’t think I know anyone like that.”

“I think you do. Good shot, my best friend?”

“Almost sounds like you’re really talking about me.”

“No way.” Johnny leaned over, kissing Boss firmly on the lips.

Boss kissed back, trying to let all anxieties melt away in the moment. This was good, and that was all there was to it, all that needed to be worried about. He stopped thinking and let Johnny push him down gently onto the mattress, the weight of Johnny’s body against his warmly comforting but just enough to leave him breathless.

Johnny buried his face in the crook of Boss’ neck, nipping at the bottom of his ear and then trailing further down his neck and across his shoulder. Boss groaned; a soft little sound that was like music to Johnny’s ears. He slipped Boss’ shirt up and over his head, freeing him just long enough to get the tank top out of the way. He liked the feeling of having Boss beneath him, having that tiny bit of control. For once Boss wasn’t in charge of every single thing. Not that Johnny would ever dream of challenging Boss for his position –– Johnny did not covet more authority or responsibility by any stretch of the imagination — but it was nice, almost like taking care of this one thing for the Boss. Don’t _you_ worry about it; I’m going to make you cum so hard you see stars.

He started stripping down himself, alternating between shedding layers of clothing and kissing Boss deep enough to leave them both breathless. This was good, this was easy. He was down to his boxers, semi-hard and mostly thinking about how exactly he was going to fuck Boss this time. He wanted to look at him, he knew that, wanted to see his face decorated with something other than the painful loss that he had been wearing all night.

Boss wriggled out of his own jeans, Johnny helping by ripping them off with a little too much enthusiasm. He grabbed Boss by the hips and flipped them both over, so he was lying flat on his back with Boss on top of him. Boss lay chest to chest with Johnny, fingers brushing through his hair with gentleness and serenity like he wasn’t grinding his cock into Johnny’s erection. Johnny slipped both hands just under the waistband of Boss’ shorts.

“I don’t want to fuck anyone but you ever again,” Boss said.

“That’s beautiful,” Johnny said. “Me fucking either.”

Boss pushed himself upright, straddling Johnny’s waist. He had his own cock in his hand, bringing himself to full erection. Johnny had his hands on Boss’ waist, sliding behind to feel his ass, the way his dick was rubbing against it. There was leisureliness to the way they were both moving, just enjoying the feeling of skin on skin, the fast familiarity of each other. It was never boring, though. Johnny could never imagine growing tired of this. He took hold of Boss’ dick, hand around the shaft and thumb rubbing over the tip. Boss bucked against his hand a little, hips jerking forward as if impatient. Come on, _fuck_ me already.

Johnny almost pulled a muscle in his shoulder straining to reach the drawers by the bed. He took the bottle from inside, made his fingers slick with lube. Boss leaned forwards, kissed Johnny as Johnny slipped a finger inside him, then two. Boss groaned a little, deliberately, just because he knew the louder he was, the more difficult it was for Johnny to pace himself. Boss was smiling at him, like teasing Johnny was a win on his side. It was infuriating, how he could so easily wind Johnny up like this. They both kind of loved it.

It was Boss who reached back, took Johnny’s cock and eased it inside himself, Johnny’s hand retreating to grip Boss’ thigh tight enough for his nails to leave indents in the delicate skin there. Boss moved slowly, pushing himself down, moving one hand to his own dick, the other right over Johnny’s heart. Johnny tried not to think about hearts and the removal thereof, the fear of seeing his own violently purple blood. This was a good moment, he didn’t need to ruin it by thinking about any feeling other than how fucking much he _loved_ seeing the Boss lean back and take his whole cock like this, the way his soft lips parted and eyes closed when he moaned. Boss got into the rhythm of it, swinging his hips back and forth as he rode Johnny, breathless and panting. He leaned forwards, bent double to kiss Johnny on the mouth, tasting cheap alcohol and sweat. Johnny thrust upwards, hard enough to make Boss moan sharply, teeth scraping his lips.

Johnny picked up the pace, holding tight onto Boss’ hips as he fucked him, the two of them moving together. He was going to leave bruises on Boss’ waist and thighs, Boss was going to leave red raised marks on his chest from his fingernails, they would brand each other for this little while. He buried his face in the crook of Boss’ neck, biting down on skin he’d already marked, recasting the bruises he’d already laid. Boss mumbled something, hot breath and skin slick with sweat on his ear, but he didn’t know what it had been. Couldn’t stop to ask, couldn’t think but for the heat rising in his chest, the shuddering of Boss’ breathing as he grew close. The heady rush of it, thrusting as deep as he could, Boss’ body jerking against his, not being able to stop himself from gasping.

Boss came first, spilling through his hand and over Johnny’s stomach, panting in a way that was almost, but not quite, a name. Johnny pulled out before he came too, riding out the last of his orgasm, cumming over the back of Boss’ thighs, fingernails still digging into soft skin. He didn’t let go until he could breathe again, eyes flickering back open, heart still pounding. Boss fell off Johnny, ungracefully hitting the bed in a sprawl. He rested his head against Johnny’s shoulder, Johnny lifting his arm to place it loosely around Boss, hand brushing on his shoulder. He could do with a shower, maybe make use of the tub in the corner of the room. Johnny wasn’t a fan of it but Boss liked the way they looked. Just screamed money.

“You got cum all over my chest,” Johnny said.

“Princess,” Boss said.

“Next time I’ll make you lick it off.”

“We’ll fucking see about that.”

“Is that a threat?”

“Wait and see.”

Boss rolled onto his side to face Johnny, glasses-less and looking as contended as the metaphorical cat. Boss had been looking at him for years, and yet he somehow still found himself amazed by how handsome Johnny really was. He could look at him all day. He was lucky he was such a consummate professional, or he’d probably get distracted. Johnny just smiled absently at him.

“How long are we going to keep doing this?” Boss said.

“I remember someone saying something about never wanting to fuck anyone else ever again,” Johnny said. “I remember saying the exact same thing.”

“You’ll put up with me forever.”

“I waited five years for you. I’m gonna fuckin’ enjoy forever.”

“How are we going to keep a secret forever?”

“Don’t tell anyone?”

Johnny wasn’t really willing to entertain the question, wanted the conversation to be over before it had really begun. Talking about it made a problem where there had previously not been one, in Johnny’s eyes, unless he was forced to talk about it he could easily continue pretending it wasn’t there. The future of their relationship, to him, was not something that needed to be thought about at all. The future was not something they needed to consider at all, when he could so easily remain in the present.

“Never tell anyone,” Boss said, voice flat.

“Why would we?” Johnny said. He didn’t want to be having this conversation. He was tired, and he’d wanted to spend his night basking comfortably in the afterglow of sex, maybe enjoying a second round, and then drifting off comfortably to sleep in what was now essentially his second home.

Boss said nothing then, stiff in uncomfortable silence, fiddling with the leather wristband he was still wearing, clicking the popper open and closed rapidly enough to catch the skin of his thumb in it.

“Do you _want_ to tell people?” Johnny said. The dream, like some kind of damning prophecy, sprung back into his mind.

“No,” Boss said. Neither of them really believed it when he said it. “Hypothetically… What if we told Pierce and Shaundi?”

“No.”

“ _Hypothetically_.”

“Hypo _nothing_ ; they don’t need to know about what we do in private. No one _wants_ to know. Don’t need to rub it in everybody’s faces.”

Johnny tried to pull Boss close to him, persuade him to put his head back on his shoulder. Boss resisted, surprising them both, Johnny withdrawing his hand and trying to pretend that he wasn’t hurt in a confused way. Didn’t understand the denial of his request for affection.

There was a pressing, desperate need in Johnny’s chest, and he was dimly aware that it was the desire to run. Lying on the bed with Boss’ cold blue eyes locked on his, he felt more scared than he had in years. This relationship — Jesus, was it really a _relationship?_ — was like blindly stumbling into something he’d told himself didn’t exist, like finding Santa Claus’ workshop in his fucking garage. You spend long enough telling yourself something is impossible, that it becoming a reality was more terrifying than exhilarating.

“I used to think I just looked up to you,” Boss said. “Like you were my hero. There was an explanation.”

Johnny didn’t _want_ to know what it was an explanation for, wanted Boss’ words to be meaningless, but the truth was that he _did_ know. And he understood.

“You’re my best friend,” he said.

And they stared at each other in reluctant, hurt silence. It wasn’t even untrue, it was just a simplification and half-truth said out of blind fear. All Johnny could think about was purple blood so sickeningly bright it hurt to look at, and he pushed himself across the space between them to press his lips to Boss’. Easier to be physical than it was to say anything, show how he felt rather than try to explain it. Boss kissed him back, mouth open and lips soft and willing. Johnny was so glad, so glad that they had this. He knew he was cold, because he had always tried to be, but he needed the Boss. Whatever happened, he needed his best friend. But then Boss pulled back, stopped, leaving Johnny feeling like he’d just lost an argument he hadn’t been paying attention to.

“We’re not just friends,” Boss said.

Johnny’s jaw was so tense he had to force his teeth apart to speak, useless words that didn’t do anything that fill the air with awkward pauses and distractions.

“No,” he said, eventually, as if he was forcing himself to admit it under torture.

“Are we dating?” Boss said. It was interrogative rather than plaintive, wanting Johnny’s final opinion on the matter.

Johnny groaned and put his hands over his face, pressing his glasses against the bridge of his nose until it was painful. He found he couldn’t look at the Boss.

“How is _this_ dating?” Johnny said.

“You said you don’t want to see anyone other than me,” Boss said. “We’re in an _exclusive_ relationship.”

“What would be the point of seeing anyone else if I have you?” Johnny said, and then immediately regretted it.

Boss just stared at him in silence, as if he’d made his entire point without having to try. Johnny rolled off the bed and stood up, standing with his back to Boss so as not to look at him at all. That desire to run was loud and clear in his head, but he didn’t know where he’d be able to go where this wasn’t going to be eating at his thoughts constantly. The Boss was everywhere in Stilwater, and everything in Stilwater would just make Johnny remember him. This city was the Boss as much as it was the Saints’ property.

“We’re aren’t dating,” Johnny said. “Dating is about being in love, and shit.”

He was terrified then; of the response he might get. _But I love you._ Like sweat evaporating off cooling skin, or hot blood congealing and going cold on your hands, it left him cold.

“Are you ashamed of me?”

He hadn’t been expecting that. He pulled on his boxers, his jeans, distracted himself with the busywork of getting dressed.

“Johnny,” Boss said, voice turning angry. He didn’t like being ignored. He was pulling on clothes as well, reflexively, avoiding the vulnerability of being the only naked guy in the room.

“I don’t know!” Johnny said, snapping, filled with a raw new anger born largely out of fear.

It was the wrong thing to say and do and the guilt inside him was enormous and awful, and it just made him angrier. The look on Boss’ face, bitter, resentful, was all around too much for Johnny to deal with. He didn’t like not getting along with the Boss, didn’t know how to handle it. None of this was within his comfort zone.

“You are,” Boss said. “You don’t want anyone to know because you are.”

“And what are you? Proud? You wanna go telling everyone everything about us?” Johnny was bordering on shouting now. He didn’t shout a lot, hadn’t since he was a dumb lieutenant in a new-born gang, but he couldn’t pull himself back now. “No one wants to hear about how good you suck dick!”

“We’re not going to tell them about how we _fuck,_ I want people to know about _us_.”

“There’s no _difference._ ”

“So we’re just friends who fuck?”

“Yes! No… No. I don’t _know_.” Johnny was running out of patience for this. “What the fuck is your next question? _What_ _are_ _we Johnny_? You sound like a little bitch.”

“ _Fuck_ you!”

They had been standing on opposite sides of the bed, Johnny stubbornly not looking at the Boss, but now they were getting close. The anger was turning physical, the Boss’ feeling of betrayal demanding some kind of physical penance, the only way he knew how to handle this kind of confrontation. He grabbed Johnny by the shoulder to spin him around, to face him, and Johnny shoved him back. Laying hands on the Boss brought back the nightmare and Johnny couldn’t help but cringe then, as though afraid of the consequences of touch. Boss didn’t really seem to notice, too caught up in his own anger.

“Tell me,” Boss said, “tell me to my face you’re ashamed of me, you fucking _coward_.”

“Get the fuck away from me.”

Johnny turned away, hands held up like he was exhausted, walking away from the situation entirely. Maybe he was a coward. He didn’t want to do this, didn’t want to have any involvement in any of this. Johnny loved a good fight, and everything about this fight left him feeling like he was drowning, with the shore in sight but unreachable, unable to understand how to get there. He had to leave, giving into his flight instinct and heading for the door out of Boss’ room.

He hesitated, for a split second, but there was no possibility that he could stay. He grabbed the handle of the door, and let himself out into the hallways of Purgatory.

Boss felt sick. In truth, he knew exactly what he wanted. He knew what he had always wanted, buried under the layers of thick denial. He loved Johnny, and had the oh-so tragically predictable and human need to be loved in return. He made himself sick.

 

Johnny had met Aisha when he was a kid. They had hit it off – or not – immediately, and the tangled web of their on-again-off-again relationship had begun right away. Over the years, he’d never found anyone else who he’d really fallen in love with. Sure, he’d dated other women, but it always came back to Aisha one way or the other. Maybe having her not be there anymore was the only way he would ever have been able to end up with the Boss. He’d always loved both of them, and he wasn’t about to make a call about which was more _important_ , but he’d never have given up on Aisha. It was kind of a cruel joke that she’d been taken when he was only just starting to treat her decently. Johnny had many regrets.

He had first had a crush on a boy when he was fourteen. Maybe there had been others before, but that had been the first time he couldn’t deny it. Alejandro had been in his year at school, most of his classes. He was at Johnny’s school in Sunnyvale because he had been expelled from the other high school in the Barrio for fighting. Within days, he was in detention as often as Johnny was. Within weeks, they were friends. Johnny thought he was incredible, the most badass person he knew, a real gangster in the making. He hated Los Carnales and the Vice Kings with a vengeance, and him and Johnny spent a long time detailing their plans for what they’d do if they ever got the chance. They’d kissed, once, a long kiss in Alejandro’s cramped bedroom fuelled by too much beer and stolen weed. Johnny had never talked to Alejandro again.

He spent a very long time after that pretending it had never happened. Excuses, flat out denial, complete ignorance of it. As though he had been unable to control his own actions, he dismissed the entire thing as if it had never happened at all. It was not something he ever thought about, a deliberately repressed part of his life story.

Aborted teenage love stories were not the end of it. Alejandro was not the end of it. There were others, there were always others. He had a definite type; cocky, violent, and not willing to take shit from him or anyone else. He hated that this happened enough for him to see patterns in the guys he liked. Most of the time he just ran away. It wasn’t hard, to keep himself from ever having to grow too close to anyone at all. Easy to just keep yourself to yourself.

Boss had broken that like a bullet through a plate glass window. Bit by bit, the relationship had turned into something more than casual, then more than friendship, and then more than just sex. Like shards of glass falling out of a broken window, his defence had collapsed. The Boss had blasted through Johnny’s every limitation exactly like he had blasted through the city, an unstoppable force of nature that took no prisoners. Johnny had kept the defences for a reason; it had been a lot easier to hold onto a wall than the nothing at all behind it. He didn’t know where to go from here.

 

The Phillips Building had been an eyesore — it still was, but at least it was a condemned, crumbling eyesore, a monument to Ultor’s failure and the Saints’ success — but the Nautilus was something else. Caught in the afternoon sun, something about the framework of the building that Ultor were putting together — with the speed and efficiency of people that were scared they were about to get caught — rubbed Johnny the wrong way. Ultor knew damn well that if the Saints took a disliking to their new tower that the thing would come down faster than sandcastles standing in the way of the ocean, and the only thing to do was to get it up so fast that the Saints didn’t have time to make up their minds about it. It astonished Johnny that Ultor had the gall to start building something new already, when the dust had barely been given time to settle in the empty Phillips Building offices. He didn’t know why they hadn’t stuck a helicopter through this one as well; you couldn’t leave infected flesh like this, you had to cut it out, stop the infection from spreading.

Driving over the highway past the Docks it was impossible not to look at the Nautilus, and heading into Saint’s Row right after made the framework of Ultor’s newest monstrosity seem even more foreboding. Look at what might be, if you don’t do something about it. Johnny had been powerless to stop Saint’s Row from being destroyed, but he could help the rest of his city. The idea of doing something, taking down the Nautilus and laughing in Ultor’s face, gave him a surge of power, the feeling that victory was already nearly ascertained. But then he remembered the Boss, and the victory was quenched and replaced with the hollow understanding that he would have to fix his other problems before he could start fantasising about bombs and tanks and attack choppers.

He was with a couple of other Saints, Darius and Jude, people who had been around since the Saints had reformed and were as loyal as you could ever want in a soldier. Johnny did not really need back up in order to carry out the day to day work of extorting the shop owners in the Row for protection money, but maybe he liked having people around to look intimidating alongside him. And Darius and Jude were alright, both of them too old and too experienced to act like troublemaking little shits like some of the newer Saints. There were worse people to spend your working days with.

The big fancy stores in the Row loved to pretend they weren’t paying protection money to the Saints, their need for discretion leaving Johnny walking out of a fancy clothing store carrying a briefcase full of cash. The briefcase came from the store’s own line and handing it over, the store’s manager had looked at Johnny and said;

“People seeing you with this will probably be good for business. People love to buy what celebs are using.”

Johnny had told her that was dumb as hell, and left the store feeling both like a success story and like something was distinctly wrong with what the manager had told him. He could remember as a child, when the Vice Kings were still building their empire, and understood now the rift that had created. The Vice King’s decision to focus on the legitimate record business had weakened their hold on the city, the Los Carnales rebuild their strength and gave the Rollerz room to creep in. Not to mention all the people who had left the gang, disgusted by the way it was turning. Johnny thought Benjamin King was a near unparalleled badass — the only ones who had ever stood up to him being himself and the Boss, of course — but he didn’t want to follow in his footsteps. Part of him thought it sounded fun, maybe just for the novelty of it, but a very vocal part of him thought signing autographs and doing photoshoots thought it sounded like the fakest shit he’d ever heard. He was not a celebrity.

“Did you hear what she said to me?” He asked the others, because he wanted the confirmation of absurdity.

“You should be a model, Gat,” Jude said.

“For guns, maybe,” Darius said.

“Only if I get to keep them,” Johnny said.

Walking down the road, they could see the Church in the distance, the centrepiece of the Row. God, it pissed him off. And the Phillips Building right behind it, like a parasite that had latched onto the ground and was draining the city dry. Or would have done, if they hadn’t ripped it open. But the shell was still there, and the shell made him angry. Why let any trace of it remain? It was better all gone. Salt the earth.

“You okay chief?” Jude said, staring at Johnny with a quizzical expression, one of her eyebrows raised. He had come to a dead halt on the sidewalk in order to glare at the Church, after all.

“Yeah,” Johnny said. He indicated the Phillips Building. “Hate that thing.”

“You should do something about it,” Darius said. He had stolen a fistful of sunglasses from the store, and was showing them off to Jude. She shook her head at the reflective wraparounds he was wearing. “Just demolish it or some shit.”

“Get Boss in on that,” Jude said. “Date night.”

_“What_?” Johnny said, panic shooting through him.

His tone took Jude by surprise, the anger, to her, a complete indecipherable mystery connected to absolutely nothing.

“I was just kidding, chief,” she said. “Sorry.”

He wouldn’t have said he felt _guilty_ , but he knew he’d overreacted. He couldn’t really bring himself to apologise himself, just grunting and shrugging her apology off. He caught sight of her exchanging worried looks with Darius out of the corner of his eye and pretended he hadn’t seen it. He didn’t want to explain himself to either of them. And he wasn’t going to, on principle.

Darius and Jude lapsed back into gossiping, talking about other Saints and people they knew, who was cool and who was making a fool out of themselves. Darius was deeply scornful of someone called Drew, but mentioning him made Jude go suddenly quiet, like she wasn’t comfortable talking about him. Initially he wasn’t that interested, but eventually Johnny forced himself to start listening, curiosity piqued.

“He just thinks he knows better because he’s old,” Darius said. “He’s washed up, and he wants to think the other washed up old men would agree with him, because then he can blame it all one someone else. He’s just pretending every asshole out there who has ever been mad at the Boss has to be on his ‘side’.”

“Wait,” Johnny said, “who is this guy?”

“Drew Corti,” Darius said. “He was the guy who was telling Boss about what a great leader Julius was. What a load of bullshit.”

“There a lot of people talkin’ shit about the Boss?”

“No,” Jude said. “You’re always going to get assholes, or people who ain’t happy, but it’s not like it’s a _lot_ of people.”

“And they think Julius would be better?” Johnny said, outrage. “That fucking traitor?”

He was struck then, by the sudden memory that Jude had joined the Saints at the very tail-end of Julius’ rule, that it had not been him or the Boss that had led her into the fold, but Julius Little himself. It was the same for Johnny, it was the same for the Boss, but something about that made him feel strange. Like they were owned by Julius, somehow. There were Saints who hated Julius as much as he did, and plenty of those he’d invited back into the gang, when they were new and the only respect they got was from people who remembered. And there were Saints, old Saints that he’d invited, who Johnny didn’t know, and who didn’t really care about Johnny or the Boss at all. Neither Johnny nor the Boss had been all that popular in Julius’ heyday, after all. People had been afraid of them, thought they were uncontrollable, too violent, too vicious.

And something about that unsettled him, the idea that there were people in the group who were there not for the Boss, or even for what he and the Boss had built together, but for the promises a dead man had made. He’d not even fallen for Julius’ promises himself; he’d joined the gang because he wanted to beat the shit out of the Vice Kings and Los Carnales. He didn’t like the idea there was any kind of loyalty to Little.

“You knew Julius, didn’t you?” Johnny said to Jude.

“Not really,” Jude said. “He never talked to me that much. I worked with Troy, mostly.”

Another traitor.

“What did you think of him?”

“Troy? I thought he was a nice guy. Didn’t know he was no fuckin’ cop—”

“No, Julius.”

“Oh. I don’t know. I thought he was like… Smart, I guess. I thought he knew what he was talking about, he was actually beating the other gangs. But now I figure… It was Boss doing all that shit, wasn’t it?”

“Yeah, it was,” Johnny said. “He did everything back then. He killed Price, he killed Lopez, he killed Sharp, he helped me save King. Fuck, he even saved my ass from Anthony Green. All Julius ever did was point him in the right direction.” Johnny did not normally talk this much all at once, but it was pouring out of him then, like he was really, _really_ trying to convince Jude of the Boss’ excellence. Like he needed her to believe. “Me and Boss dragged this gang out of the fucking grave and I never could have done it with him. Julius would have had nothing without him. I’d be dead without him.”

Jude and Darius stared at him with a mixture of astonishment and some kind of amusement, like they weren’t entirely sure what they’d just seen. It wasn’t very characteristic of Johnny to give a speech about anything, let alone how much he appreciated someone. But he couldn’t bring himself to care, because none of it had really been for them.

He was so proud of the Boss, he realised. He couldn’t be ashamed of him, of working with him, of being his friend. But there was still that disgust, inside himself. It wasn’t about Boss, hadn’t ever been about the Boss.

He was just ashamed of himself.

 

He still hadn’t seen the Boss since last night. Couldn’t bring himself too, not ready to have a conversation and admit what he was thinking. He went for a drive instead, almost drove past Aisha’s old place, just to see it, but decided he didn’t need to see who owned it now. He knew Aisha’s sister had handled it, sold the property on after he’d finally dragged all his crap out and admitted that he had no legal right to the place. He didn’t want it anyway, hadn’t been able to look at the place after Eesh had died, let alone live there again. He didn’t know what he was doing, or why, was just running from the inevitable oncoming _conversation_.

Johnny sat in his car, half a block away from the home he used to share with Aisha, and tried and failed not to think too much about her. What would she think of this? He felt sure that she’d be unsurprised, somehow, as though she’d seen this coming better than he could have. She was always smarter than him, even if she’d often been just as stubborn and bull-headed, she’d been less impulsive, less rash. Didn’t have his anger and his bloodlust. She’d made him better than he had been, better than the smart-ass thug who pissed people off for the fun of it. And she’d been taken, not just from him, but from the world. Whole world was a worse place without her.

Would she have approved of this? She’d known how close he was with the Boss, she used to joke about how he saw Johnny more than she did sometimes. God, he didn’t know. Thinking about the future where she was with him and this wasn’t happening made his head spin, the differences too much for him to really figure out. He didn’t know they’d have even stayed together. He was always an asshole, and the two of them had always fought. Maybe in the future where she was a live, he’d ended up with the Boss anyway. Maybe they’d still had an all too sober one-night stand and fallen into this mess. Who knew. There was no way to ever know.

Did he love Boss as much as he’d loved Aisha? Making the comparison felt wrong, the relationships were entirely different beasts, the way he thought of them wasn’t the same. He loved them both. He had never said it enough to either of them. There was only one of them left for him to say it to, now. Jesus, he was such an idiot. Such a fucking idiot.

The acceptance that he wanted to — that he liked to — have sex with men was hard enough by itself. Convincing himself that he was even capable of loving another man was something else. He didn’t know what made it so much more difficult; it felt less plausible. Gays could _fuck_ , but you couldn’t pretend those kinds of relationships were the same as real ones, could you?

_Could_ you? People did, the Boss seemed to think it was plausible, but Johnny didn’t like the implications of _coming out_. Didn’t like the idea that people would have things they thought, things to say. It wasn’t just about what he wanted, or what the Boss wanted, it was about what was best for the gang. What wasn’t going to get them killed. Or even if they weren’t killed, then losing half the gang, the people who weren’t going to tolerate or respect something like that.

But, hypothetically, Pierce and Shaundi weren’t going to turn on them. They could trust their friends. And more than that, he couldn’t leave the Boss thinking that he hated him, that he was ashamed of him. Him and Boss were, in his opinion, immortal, but he that didn’t mean he had to be a complete piece of shit for the whole time they were ruling the world. Time for Johnny Gat to grow the fuck up, he decided. Someone had to be _kind of_ responsible for his actions, and no one else was going to own up to them any time soon. He needed to find the Boss.

 

Purgatory was home, both Boss and Johnny thought of it that way. It was the gang’s home, and that made it the centre of their world. But then you had Red Light loft, and it was different. Maybe it was the privacy of the place; in Purgatory, you could never forget there were a hundred other people on the other side of the door, but Red Light was secluded, left no fear that they would be overheard. Tiny, cramped, a dismal little hole in the ground, but also _theirs_. It was filled with their things, a sense of domesticity that came from having their things mixed together, a space that was just for the two of them. Private and personal, it really gave an idea of what it would be like to live together in a traditional sense. Johnny had always thought he was going to end up married and living with his partner one. He was struggling to see how this was so different.

Boss had not consciously been waiting for Johnny in Red Light, hadn’t been whiling away the time hoping he was going to show. But Boss had been expecting it, maybe hoping for it. So he wasn’t surprised when the door opened and Johnny walked inside, but really he was glad. In all honesty he just didn’t like spending too much time without Johnny. It made him feel very profoundly alone.

Johnny stood in the doorway for a moment, leaning on the door and staring at the Boss in unreadable silence. Boss muted the TV, like the whining voices of the people in the reality show he’d been watching had been putting Johnny off. He didn’t want to speak first, could sense that Johnny had something to say, was gearing up to it. The silence wasn’t good, but bearing it was better than flooding the air with idle chatter.

“The nightmare wasn’t about me being hurt,” Johnny said.

“What?” Boss said. “From the other night?”

“Yeah. I didn’t get hurt,” Johnny said. “You did.”

“That’s not anything new.”

“I did it. I ripped your heart right out of your chest.” Johnny walked inside, sat on the bed. He was noticeably muted, the honesty taking something out of his boisterousness.

“It was just a dream.”

“I fucking hated it. I don’t want to hurt you, I…” Johnny struggled to find the words he was looking for, limited understanding of what he was trying to say making it impossible to communicate. “I hurt you because I was too stupid to understand what I was doing.”

“Dreams are worst when they’re real.”

Johnny looked hurt by that, but didn’t complain about it. He kept looking at the Boss and then glancing away again, as though distracted by his own thoughts. Boss had had to move out of his chair to face Johnny, was standing in front of him now like he was performing a speech. It made them both feel uncomfortable, but Boss didn’t want to bring himself too close without being sure it was the right thing to do. Right then he didn’t know if he was really wanted.

“I’m sorry,” Johnny said.

“I always said we were going to fuck this up,” Boss said.

“Fuck that!” Johnny said. “Fuck this!” He was on his feet now as well, grabbed Boss’ arms with such suddenness it was shocking. It wasn’t clear what he was doing it for, other than out of some need to bridge that gap. “I’m done fighting about what we _are_. Being with you has always been the most fun I’ve ever had, and that’s all that matters.”

“It’s not just about having fun,” Boss said. “It’s about being happy.”

“You make me happy! You always have!”

“I don’t mean happy because we get to blow up a building.”

“Neither do I.”

There was a lot that neither of them could say; their vocabulary was limited, their resistance to the things they feared the most so great that they couldn’t really ever be that honest with each other. They shared the exact same limitations and that helped them understand one another, but it would always get in the way as well, vulnerable to being felled by the exact same foes.

Johnny felt like the Boss’ presence was guaranteed, he took it for granted, now that they had been reunited he did not believe there was any risk of them being apart. Being torn apart by a break-up was absurd; their relationship would have to work, because there was no way the world could keep on turning without the two of them together. The Boss’ presence was mandatory for his happiness; he had lived without Boss, and it was not something he would ever go through again. He would not allow himself to be the one to blame if everything went to hell.

Boss didn’t feel that same guarantee. He didn’t know what it was like to lose Johnny — he had not been around for his own forced absence — and while the idea was instinctively horrifying, Johnny’s reticence made it impossible for the Boss to know how much vanishing had affected him. Boss still had that fear, that he was of lesser value to Johnny than Johnny was to him. He wasn’t able to just be sure that he was safe in their relationship, that the cool and beautiful girl Johnny told everyone else he was dating wouldn’t just appear.

“I’m not ashamed of you,” Johnny said. “You know how fucking cool you are?”

“I have a pretty good idea.”

“Tell Shaundi and Pierce. Who fucking cares. I’m… I…”

For a second Boss thought Johnny was going to say he loved him.

“You make me happy,” Johnny finished, with some concerted effort.

It was mostly the same thing. Boss kissed him hard, and let Johnny wrap his arms around him and crush them together, so tightly neither of them could really breathe. Johnny took a step back and let them both fall down onto the bed, crashing onto the mattress in a tangled knot, Boss on top of him and held tightly to him.

“Hey,” Johnny said. “Talking of blowing things up.”

Boss laughed, not sure if it was a joke.

“We should blow up the Nautilus.”

“What? Why?”

“ _Why_?” Johnny said, aghast. “It’s Ultor. Why are _we_ letting them build it?”

“We’re not at war anymore,” Boss said. “We don’t need to drive out every company in the city. Vogel is gone, they’re just another clothing company now.”

“The fuck they are. What happened to everything sounding fun with me?”

“I didn’t say it wasn’t fun. I don’t think it’s a good idea.”

“It’s a good idea _because_ it’s fun.”

“No, Johnny.”

“Can we at least take down the Phillips Building?”

Boss thought about the husk of the building that still stood at the precipice of Saint’s Row, a building he had once considered a tombstone marking Ultor’s own grave. He had adapted to its presence in the Stilwater skyline in a way he did not like, grown adjusted to the change that — for him — had appeared overnight, as suddenly and as without warning as the explosion that had sent him into the coma. The adaptation made him feel like he was growing to _accept_ it, abandoning Saint’s Row to its fate as something that was not, would never be his. He didn’t know that he wanted to make peace, to accept the loss and move on with his life.

He might have been ready to let some of Ultor’s invasion slip by, but there was really no good in leaving a job half done.

“Maybe we should,” he said.

Johnny grinned, suddenly, wild and beautiful and like watching the sun rising over the crest of the Stilwater lake.

“Yeah,” Boss said. “I do make you happy.”

 

The problem was not that Johnny did not love the Boss. He was such a poor liar that he couldn’t get away with denying it even to himself. The problem was that when Johnny heard about when two men were in love, part of him was disgusted, had no desire to hear about it or to know. ‘People can do whatever they want in their own home, I just don’t have to hear about it.’ And this was what Johnny expected from everyone else. After all, if he, a man who was not able to stop himself from falling in love and lust with other men, was disgusted by it, then how could everyone else _not_ be? The problem was not him at all, he felt, it was him knowing everyone else too well.

Boss had loved Johnny for so long that he could not separate it from the rest of himself. It was like living with some kind of chronic ache; he had lived with it long enough that he could no longer remember what it was like to live _without_ it. He understood it was there, but he didn’t have to think about it. He did not have to be reminded, or have it tested. Boss had spent years pretending he didn’t love Johnny, because it was easier to pretend he wasn’t than do anything about it. It was more than a fear of rejection; it was a very real unconscious fear for his own safety. You never really knew how people would react.

Neither of them had said any of this. They both could not, and would not, talk like this with each other. The Boss found that trying was like physically dragging words out of himself when they had been engraved into his bones. Johnny didn’t know what it was like, because he couldn’t bring himself to even try. He wouldn’t know where to begin translating the shit that went on in his head into words, taking what he knew based purely on instinct and making it something verbal, something understandable to himself and others. It demanded more thought than he liked to give.

Thankfully, walking inside the Saint’s Row Condo and into the dining room, closing the heavy red wood doors closed behind them, they knew weren’t going to have to explain any of this to anyone else, either. Pierce and Shaundi were sitting on opposites of the dining table that took up most of the room, engaged in their usual conversation; half talking, half verbally battling each other. They had never really grown out of treating each other with sibling-like contempt, the kind of rivalry where they endlessly competed over nothing and everything, for no reason other than the sheer joy of pissing each other off. Sometimes Boss kind of wanted to bash their head in, but most of the time he could handle it. They were his friends, after all.

Johnny kicked out a chair and sat down next to Shaundi, putting his feet up on the table. He gave her a little nod, and she grinned back, looking encouraged by this gesture. Pierce rolled his eyes and leaned back in his chair, looking up at the Boss, who was standing at the head of the table and thinking about how to start talking.

“Alright, Boss?” Pierce said. He didn’t bother trying to get Boss or Johnny to comment on whatever they’d been arguing about before, knowing that he wouldn’t get anything but irritation that he’d asked in the first place.

“Yeah,” Boss said. “Look, we gotta talk.”

“About what?” Shaundi said. She looked like she wasn’t sure if Boss was joking or not, her grin a little tentative. “Did we miss another gang fight?”

“No, thank fuck,” Boss said. “No. Me and Johnny… Have been seeing each other. For a while.”

Pierce and Shaundi froze, staring, and then looked at each other like they were trying to communicate something silently. Johnny had folded his arms to his chest and was now sitting so stiffly that he looked like he might crack at the seams if you tried to move him. The silence was not reassuring him, and if someone didn’t speak soon he was going to lose his fucking mind.

“Like dating?” Pierce said.

“Yeah,” Boss said. “Dating.”

“Well,” Shaundi said. “Okay. That’s ok.”

“ _That_ _’s okay?_ ” Johnny said, no one sure if he was angry or confused or both.

“I gotta say you both seem… _Unsurprised,_ ” Boss said. “Did you _know_?”

“No,” Shaundi said, quick to want to calm everyone down. “Like, we didn’t _know_. No one told us, _you_ didn’t tell us.”

“Yeah like, we didn’t know,” Pierce said, “but we _knew_ , you know?”

“You can’t just say whatever words you want and pretend it’s a sentence,” Boss said.

“How did you know?” Johnny said.

“Have you _seen_ you two?” Pierce said. “I was sure you were fucking when we first met. I thought you were in love with Boss when I met you in _prison_ , Johnny. You guys are like, made for each other.”

Everyone relaxed a little. Boss found himself, unexpectedly, smiling. He looked at Johnny, who was visibly confused by the grin on Boss’ face.

“You talked about me a lot back then?” Boss said.

Johnny shrugged, tried to play it off. “You were on my mind.”

“ _Was_ I?”

It was a joke, but Johnny glowered from behind his shades with ferocity that made Boss think he’d seriously misspoken. They weren’t at the stage of making public jokes, he guessed.

“You guys are _Boss and Johnny_ ,” Shaundi said. “This doesn’t feel like a big change, y’know? Dating or not, you’re kind of a package deal. I don’t think this is going to change anything with us.”

“We got your back, you know?” Pierce said.

Johnny relaxed a little, unclenching his jaw and loosening his shoulders. He had been so tense that he looked ready to spring up and start shooting at a moments’ notice. But Shaundi and Pierce were so calm, Boss couldn’t help but feel this had been a good move. Nothing was any different, Shaundi was right, they were already so close that this didn’t have to be a big thing. They could just carry on the same as always.

“We don’t want anyone else to know,” Johnny said. “Let’s keep this between the four of us, yeah?”

His tone was forceful enough that it left no room for argument. Pierce and Shaundi just nodded in agreement, not trying to add anything more onto that or question his demands. It was pretty self-explanatory why they’d want to be quiet. And really, they weren’t going to argue anyway, weren’t going to fight over something that wasn’t really their business.

But Boss felt alright. Johnny didn’t look certain, but the matter felt resolved to him. There were other things to be getting on with, and this was not something worth worrying about. They were going to be ok, climbing over the first hurdle in the long journey of their new relationship. Maybe they hadn’t handled it perfectly, but they were actually starting to grow as people, as terrifying as that seemed. Who knew what would happen next. They had work to do and lives to live and at least they could trust their friends.

 

It was two weeks before the rest of the gang knew.

 

“The shipment’s coming in at 3 AM. I want guys there, fully armed. If the cops _do_ know about this one, then there’s almost definitely going to be a firefight. Me and Johnny are going to be on watch, but we’re going to need backup, and we’re going to need guys to transport the shipment to the warehouse. Splitting it up makes it less likely the cops will get the whole thing. Are you listening to me?”

The Saint being scolded, staring at her cell phone, glanced up at the Boss with genuine fear in her eyes. She nodded frantically, but seemingly couldn’t stop herself from looking back at her cell. The Boss found himself more irritated than he perhaps necessarily needed to be by the idea of someone not listening to him because they’d rather be texting. He looked at Johnny, exasperated, and Johnny just shrugged. He took that as a sign to calm down and let it go. Some things were not worth getting too worked up over, and he wasn’t going to act like a high school teacher fighting to get his students’ attention. If people fucked up in the Saints, they’d pay, and it wouldn’t have to be Boss bringing down the consequences.

“I want the drugs shipment divided up and in four different cars. Two go to the warehouse, two go to Purgatory. Take different routes. If cops get on your tail, lose them first. The cops have been sniffing around our last warehouse a little too fucking much for my liking and…”

He trailed off, watching in disbelief as more and more of the Saints stopped listening to him to look at their phones, their reactions so strong that many of them were completely unable to conceal their shock. Johnny now too was looking frustrated, looking around the room with his face twisted into the same expression of confusion as the Boss.

They were gathered in Purgatory, as usual, Boss giving his instructions from his desk in his office room, Johnny at his side while the others watched. But now the Saints with him, good soldiers he trusted to do a job well, were suddenly acting like children. This was the kind of shit he expected from wannabes, not from people who were actually doing this shit for real, who were actual gangsters. He was not fucking impressed, had seen enough cycles of Saints gossip to not care about whatever this new story was. There were more important things to care about than who was sleeping with who.

“Are you fucking done?” Boss said to the room. Some of them obliged, cramming phones in pockets and fixing their eyes on him in awe, but plenty of them didn’t. Plenty of them looked at him like he was kidding them somehow, like they were waiting for the other shoe to drop.

“What the hell is going on?” Johnny demanded, and the tone of room dramatically changed as the gathered Saints realised that perhaps this was not actually a laughing matter. “What’s so fucking funny?”

No one was willing to answer, the room silent as a funeral, the gang looking at each other and their supposedly respected leaders with suddenly fearful eyes. The situation was no longer funny and was rapidly spiralling into what Boss would call ‘a fucking nightmare’. Boss stepped around the desk and held out his hand towards the nearest Saint, her expression one of a rabbit facing down an oncoming 18-wheeler and realising that it was driving at her on purpose.

“Show me,” the Boss said.

“No?” She ventured, a question rather than a flat refusal.

“I wasn’t asking.”

“I don’t think you wanna see it.”

“I’ll be the judge of that. Show me. You were the one who got it first, I wanna see what’s so important.”

She stuttered but clearly couldn’t come up with an excuse, and ended up handing over her phone with a mumbled excuse about her not being the one who had taken it. Boss was about to ask what the hell she was talking about, but that was before he looked down at the phone screen in his hands and saw for himself exactly what she was talking about.

The photo was taken through the passenger window of a car, blurry through the multiple layers of glass. It was light outside, but it was the cold yellow light of the sun first rising, the sunlight reflecting off the windows of the skyscrapers around them. Through the window, you could see the windscreen of Johnny’s car, waiting at a stop light as the photographer’s car drove past. And inside the car sat Boss and Johnny, Boss in the driver’s seat as always, leaning over to Johnny. Johnny had his hand on the back of the Boss’ head, pulling him in close. They were kissing. There was no denying it or making claim that something else was going on, they were clearly kissing. Lips locked and eyes closed, Johnny almost looking like he was smiling. Like they were happy together.

The photograph made Boss’ mouth go dry, staring at it in abject shock. He knew Johnny was going to be freaking out before he even looked at him, Johnny standing rigid and staring at Boss, almost pleading for some kind of confirmation that things were not as bad as they were in his own mind. They were worse.

“Who took this?” Boss said, voice restrained. There was a burst of denials of blame in the room, no one sure who had taken the photo first, everyone just an innocent who had been sent the picture without their own consent. You can’t hold any of them responsible for what had happened, they were just as much victims of the photographer’s lust for shit-stirring gossip as the Boss and Johnny were.

“What is it?” Johnny said, quiet, the anger muted in a way that should have screamed danger to anyone with common sense.

Boss had not ever really considered it a possibility that their relationship would stay secret forever. It just wouldn’t happen, wasn’t realistic, but he hadn’t been pushing himself to really decide on future plans of coming out, either. Had been sitting back and waiting for the future to come down on him without him having to get involved. One day their relationship would be common knowledge, maybe, and then they’d deal with the situation. But he absolutely had not been expecting the future to arrive right now. Things had a way of happening regardless of whether or not the Boss wanted them to, and time — as already proven — passed in sudden leaps and lurches that the Boss wasn’t entirely aware of. And now there was this, and for one of the first times in his life, he was faced with a problem he could do nothing about.

Johnny had thought they could keep it secret for as long as he wanted. He thought it was entirely under his control. As far as he was concerned, he was safe.

Boss handed him the phone, didn’t look at him, just showed him the open photograph and let him process it on his own. Johnny said nothing.

“You don’t know who took this,” Boss said.

“No!”

“No I just got it right now from Scarlett I ain’t ever seen this before.”

“Invasion of privacy, isn’t it?”

“No idea who took it, no idea Boss.”

“But you still thought it was a good idea to just spread it around?” Boss said.

The Saints were still mumbling excuses and apologies, but Boss didn’t wanna hear them. Johnny was still silent, staring at the picture on the phone in awe, like he was looking at proof aliens were roaming Stilwater. Boss held up a hand and everyone fell eventually into calamitous silence, out of sync.

“Get the fuck out,” he said.

No one moved, no one wanting to be the first to race out of the door. In the silence, Johnny finally looked up from the phone, at the group, and crushed the phone in his hand like it was a cheap piece of fibreglass.

The group scattered, and Boss wondered if that had really been the right thing to do. Maybe he could have convinced them not to spill any details, sworn them all to secrecy. But what was the point of that? The rumour hadn’t originated with anyone here, and he wouldn’t be able to hold them all accountable for it. There was no point in torturing them over it when the story was already spreading through the gang like a virus in a bad winter.

Johnny dropped the broken phone, the glass cracked into a spider web so dense it was white on the blackness of the dead screen. He was seemingly processing his response, unable to bring himself to say anything. He stared at the Boss, face expressionless. He could not say or do anything real while there was the fear of being seen, the risk of people seeing him as a person.

“What do we do?” Boss said, eventually.

“We’re fucked,” Johnny said.

He walked out of the room, back stiff and shoulders squared like a boxer, and Boss followed. He guessed it didn’t matter who say them together now. The cat was out of the bag —  the Gat was in his bed — and it gave them a new and very horrible freedom. They had not managed to get comfortable with doing so much as holding hands around Shaundi and Pierce, and this was too much all at once.

Walking down the hallway to their room, Boss felt the eyes of everyone on him. The hushed murmurs of voices made his skin crawl, brought up images of being paraded in front of a court audience before you even reached the jury. When he glanced down the stairs into the main hall of Purgatory, he caught sight of the Saints huddled around the couches and bar. Some of them looked back up at him, their expressions just as mixed and just as extreme as the sample group in the office. Even some of the girls and groupies were in on it, leaning over phones and staring up at him. It was not even confined to his own gang. How had the story spread so far, so fast? How did everyone know before he’d even had a chance to realise they’d heard? This was like nightmare rules, running on its own kind of logic that he could not understand and had to blindly accept. Saints knew and he could not escape that. He did not want to have to pay consequences for someone else’s actions.

Johnny was in their bedroom, stood staring at the chest of drawers under the TV until Boss closed the door behind him, let it click quietly into place.

“You were the one who kissed me,” Johnny said. “If you’d just waited until we’d gotten back home, this wouldn’t be happening.”

“Are you calling this my fault?” Boss said, anger exploding inside him at the injustice of it.

“I’m just saying-”

“ _Don_ _’t_ just say. Fuck _just saying_. You’re trying to pin this on me and not on our _fucking_ stalker.”

“If you hadn’t done anything, there wouldn’t have been any photograph to take.”

“ _Fuck_ you!”

“You already did. That’s how we got into this bullshit.”

For the third time in the relationship — once when he had been canonised, once when they had brawled in the Freckle Bitch’s parking lot — Boss was filled with a desire to kick Johnny in the nuts. He really could be such an asshole sometimes, in the exact same way Boss himself could be.

“Don’t be a shithead!” Boss said.

“Well what the fuck do we do, Boss? Huh?”

“We can’t do anything.”

“I don’t wanna do nothing! I want payback!”

“What we gonna do, kill the whole gang?”

Johnny looked for something to say but came up with nothing, gesticulating uselessly. He didn’t have a lot of solutions for anything that wasn’t just violence. This was all beyond him.

“I don’t know what to do,” he said, voice steely.

“We knew this was going to happen.”

“I fucking didn’t. Why weren’t you more careful? I mean, have you _seen_ us two?”

“Stop blaming me! You know they’re all out there now, fucking laughing at us holed up in here, crying about this like goddamn children.”

“Thanks Boss, that helps. That really helps. That really makes it fucking better that everyone in the _fucking_ city knows I’m a _fucking_ faggot!”

On the last word, Johnny put his fist through the Boss’ flat-screen TV. It did not make him or the Boss feel any better.

“What the fuck are you _doing_?”

“I don’t know! Everything’s so _fucked!_ ” Johnny was at a loss for words again, standing and staring at Boss with the helplessness of a child who had been asked for homework he hadn’t done. Boss didn’t have the answer either. They were both thrown completely out of their depth.

“We can’t kill our way out of this one,” Boss said.

“Shit,” Johnny said. “Shit.”

“Yeah. It is.”

They stood and stared at each other and Boss was reminded of when they’d come across the brawling Saints in the parking lot, of being told Julius could be doing a better job than him. That cold and creeping awareness that of the many things in his life that were out of his control, the members of his gang, what they said and what they thought, were some of them. His power, so newly gained, was slipping somehow. He was afraid of that.

 

“So who’s the woman, you think?”

“Don’t be fucking disgusting!”

They were sitting at the bar in Purgatory, the six of them sitting in a long line, each of them clutching a beer and looking up and down the bar as each of them took their turn to talk. Right then they were all glaring at Mike, who had had the audacity to ask questions no one fucking wanted to think about, thank you very much.

“I’m not being disgusting,” Mike complained, looking at Lacey with wounded dignity. “Don’t say you weren’t wondering the same thing.”

“I can honestly say I ain’t even in my life thought about or _wanted_ to know if Johnny Gat likes it up the ass,” Darius said, flicking the last of his cigarette into the ash tray.

“It’s gotta be Boss though, right?” Ronaldo said. “Like you don’t really think _Gat_ would let _anyone_ do that shit.”

“I don’t know and I don’t wanna know!” Darius said again.

“You guys are nasty,” Lacey said. “Fuckin’ nasty.”

“If you’re so grossed out, you gonna leave the gang?” Jude said.

“Fuck no!” Lacey said, angry her loyalty had even been questioned. “I don’t give a shit what Boss and Gat are doing. I got canonised like everybody else. Blood in, blood _out_. Not blood in, out as soon as I don’t like who they’re dating.”

The others didn’t disagree, Darius and Jude nodded with some emphasis. Ronaldo mulled it over a little, but eventually he shrugged.

“I gotta be real, fuckin’… Gay or not, I’m still scared as shit of Gat,” he said. “More scared now, maybe. You see him crush Scarlett’s phone like that? Ain’t about to get on either of their bad sides.”

“Yeah, I’m not ready to make fucking enemies with them,” Mike said, shaking his head. “It’s weird, sure, but whatever. I saw Boss take on Maero with a minigun. That ain’t someone you fuck with.”

“We should be worrying more about that shipment we got tomorrow night,” Jude said. “I’m not gonna be the one who lets the pigs get hold of two keys of coke.”

The others nodded their agreement, the subject almost laid to rest amongst that group of friends at least. Ready to let the top die and move on with their lives to more pressing issues. In the end, all it was was some funny gossip to them. Maybe that wasn’t it for everyone.

“You swore loyalty to the Saints,” said the sixth man at the bar. “Not to Boss, or to Johnny.”

“What the fuck are you talking about, Thomas?” Darius said. “Boss and Johnny _are_ the Saints.”

“No they’re not,” Thomas said. “They didn’t start the gang, and it don’t end with them neither.”

“What are you saying?” Mike said. “We throw them out? You do it then, you tell the Boss to get out the gang.”

“The gang that _he_ built,” Darius interjected.

“I’m not telling him shit,” Thomas said.

“Didn’t think so,” Jude said, swigging triumphantly on her beer like she’d won an argument.

“I don’t _have_ to,” Thomas said, angry he’d been interrupted at a dramatically inconvenient time. “Have any of you ever spoken to Ranja?”

 

Boss arrived in Technically Legal late. Johnny looked up from the booth he was sat at with Pierce and Shaundi, sitting in the corner right next to the big swing doors that led into the club. Boss slumped in the sofa beside Johnny, took the open untouched beer that had been waiting on the table for him. It had long stopped being icy cold.

“Where have you been?” Johnny said.

“Nowhere interesting,” Boss said. “Working some shit out.”

“What shit?” Johnny said. “We need to be worried?”

“No. It’s all good.”

Johnny looked at him, but Boss declined to explain any further and he chose not to push for comment. Pierce and Shaundi both looked moderately suspicious, but neither of them really felt comfortable demanding any kind of explanation from Boss. It wasn’t like he’d ever led them wrong; they trusted him to do the right thing. Johnny let his arm sit on the back of the couch, almost but deniably around Boss, and decided that if his boyfriend wanted him to know things he’d tell him in due course. He trusted Boss enough to not be worried about every moment of his day. He was more worried about the word boyfriend, and if he should feel more comfortable using it. Or less. Maybe the fact he thought the word at all was bad enough. Good enough? The worst thing ever?

“The shipment went well last night,” Pierce said, for the sake of something to say.

“Meticulous planning,” Shaundi drawled, downing the last of her beer.

“Hey, ok, maybe sending one of the routes past the police station wasn’t the best move, but-”

“Pierce, I wasn’t being sarcastic. It went well, we didn’t lose a single gram.”

“Oh. Yeah, it did go well. Pity it ain’t going to be regular, we could use that steady income.”

“We still have Loa Dust.”

“I know, but that’s so limited. You gotta _expand_ …”

Pierce had big dreams. Shaundi wanted the ship to run as tightly as it could the way that it was. Johnny just wanted to kill shit. They all had their pros and cons, it made for a more interesting discussion panel when shit was going down. Which now, unfortunately, was not very often. Maybe that was the problem, maybe things were too slow. The gang needed something else to focus on. Boss didn’t know what, though. He was only just learning how to run a gang in a time that wasn’t the relentless carnage of war himself, let alone how to keep the whole gang turning. He was making this shit up as he went along.

Boss had never relaxed in his entire life.

He saw the guys hanging out across the bar before Johnny did. He shut out the conversation around him for a moment, concentrating on the small group clustered near the second stage. None of them were Saints, weren’t flying any colours at all. But all of them were looking at him and the others, and they thought they were _really_ funny. One of the men mimed a blow job, mouth open, cheek bulging grotesquely. Boss was flooded with immediate broiling hatred. One of the other men put his arm around another, cringed in a mock effeminate manner, flicked his head like he was tossing long hair.

By this point they’d attracted the attention of not only Boss, but Johnny, Pierce and Shaundi as well. The four of them looked at each other, Pierce pulling a face of complete disgust. Johnny tilted his head to an angle in a way that anyone should have known spelt doom.

“Who the hell are these assholes?” Shaundi said.

“I don’t know,” Boss said. He nudged Johnny. “Let’s go and say hello.”

Johnny and the Boss both stood, walking towards the group of giggling children that were standing in the club they owned, as they owned everything in the city. The fucking audacity of people, to question them in their own home. People in the club took notice as they walked by, saw where they were heading, the tension in the air as sudden as walking into an unseen garrotting wire. And the guys they were marching on were still laughing, too drunk and too into their own fantasy that they didn’t even realise what they were letting themselves into.

“Hey ladies,” one of them called out as they walked closer, words slurring around the edges. “You up on stage next?”

“So are the Saints purple _because_ you’re all queers or is it just like, a bonus?” The blow job one said, his eyes sharp enough to give the impression he was close enough to sobriety to know exactly what he was doing.

“You gotta be gay to-”

What you had to be gay to do, Boss wouldn’t know, because Johnny grabbed the last speaker by the neck and lifted him a clean half foot off the ground. He gagged and choked theatrically, scrabbling desperately at Johnny’s hand.

“Gotta be gay to what?” Johnny said, voice threateningly calm.

No one got to say anything else, because that was when someone smashed a bottle over Boss’ shoulder and that was when the bar turned into an all-out brawl. Boss wheeled around to face his attacker, who was looking like he was starting to regret his actions and his friends, and punched the guy in the face so hard he went flying backwards and crashed into some chairs. He heard Pierce and Shaundi’s laughter from across the room, someone else screaming, and the adrenaline and the victory surged in him. He looked at Johnny, saw that he was grinning, and found that he couldn’t stop grinning himself.

One of the others tried lifting a chair over his head to bring it down on Boss’ back, but Boss went low, punched him in the gut and winded him completely. He doubled up, dropped the chair and fell over it, Boss kicking him in the ribs and out of the way of the fight. Someone was trying to grapple with Johnny, but Johnny had no trouble, charged forwards and threw them to the ground effortlessly. He swirled around, swung a punch at someone else and knocked them clean out before realising that he’d hit someone who hadn’t even been in the offending group or done anything at all other than be in the wrong place at the wrong time. The guy hit the floor like a tonne of bricks but Johnny shrugged it off, turned to the next guy without so much as a hiccup in his rhythm.

The fight spread very quickly, because it was Stilwater, and the entire city was on the knife edge precipice of violence at all times. A few people sprinted for the exit before the fight turned fatal, but Boss and Johnny were in the middle of it, heart of the storm, and in their fucking element. Boss barrelled someone over, knocked them flying right into Johnny, who kicked them to the ground and lurched forward only to come face to face with Technically Legal security. The guard was not looking like he was enjoying his job.

In the end someone pulled the fire alarm, and it was the water raining from the ceiling that sent them out into the parking lot finally, a couple of cats that had had a bucket of ice water thrown over them. Johnny was laughing, adrenaline making him delirious in his sudden happiness. He didn’t even care that the water had plastered his hair to his head, droplets dripping down the outside of his shades. He and Boss fed off each other’s energy, the two of them in sudden and perfect sync.

“We ain’t gonna have to deal with that forever,” Johnny said.

“Yeah?” Boss said. He was drinking from a bottle of beer, had taken it from the bar without thinking of paying.

“Nah. People going to learn fucking fast. No one respected the Saints at first either, did they?

“No,” Boss said. “Or either of us.”

“And they fucking _learned_.”

“Until then, we might get a couple good fights in.”

Pierce and Shaundi were already in the parking lot, talking and waiting for the two of them. Shaundi gave a mock salute, grinning through the darkness of the night.

 

When they were going over the flyover, Boss saw the Phillips Building jutting up, a black shining mass, dark on dark. It was dark inside the car too, headlights flashing off Johnny’s shades in the black. He took the next turn off towards Saint’s Row.

“Where we going?” Johnny said.

“I thought you wanted to blow that thing up,” Boss said. Johnny laughed.

 

They headed to the Saint’s Row condo to get one of the choppers. You could see the Phillip’s Building standing on the roof of the condo, of course, but not the church. It was somewhere down there, lost in Ultor’s shadow, a physical metaphor for itself. Johnny stood on the edge of the helipad, leaning over the railing far enough to feel the wind on his face. Boss was standing a few feet back, pausing by the helicopter.

“You know Troy and Dex?” Johnny said.

“I’ve heard of them,” Boss said.

“They definitely had a thing, right?” Johnny said.

“Yeah. I think so.”

Johnny pulled back from the edge, turned around to face the Boss. He was smiling, grinning against the wind tearing across the helipad. He looked dangerous, he looked like he was ready to fuck some shit up, he looked like a trained killer. He looked like the reason Boss had fallen for him in the first place.

“I’m getting the church back,” Boss said, pulling open the door of the chopper.

“What?” Johnny said, not sure he’d heard him correctly. He bounded across the pad to the Boss’ side in a few steps. “What did you say?”

“I’m getting the church back,” Boss said again. “It’s going to take a while, but I’m getting it.”

“How the fuck?”

“I’m working it out. Things are going back the way they should be, Johnny. They’ve been fucked up for a while, but I’m sick of that shit. We’re fixing it. _We_ _’re_ the fucking Saints, and we’re not letting anyone change that.”

Boss was about to step into the cockpit, but Johnny grabbed him and pulled him in for a long kiss.

“This is the way things should be,” Johnny said when they pulled apart, breathless in the cold night air.

Boss kissed Johnny again and then pulled away, climbed into the cockpit of the helicopter, Johnny climbing in behind him. He just about knew how to fly a chopper. Could drive anything, really. The blades above them began turning, the noise deafeningly loud in the otherwise quiet of the Stilwater night.

“We can do anything we want,” Boss shouted above the noise. “Let’s fuck something up.”

**Author's Note:**

> Just a reminder to check out [Saints Row: Undercover](http://saintsrowundercover.tumblr.com/)!


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